This blog comments on a variety of technology news, trends, and products and how they connect. I'm in Red Hat's cloud product strategy group in my day job although I cover a broader set of topics here. This is a personal blog; the opinions are mine alone.

Virtualization Then & Now: Symposium 2009-2010 - "IaaS (infrastructure as a service) providers have focused on open source and internal technologies to deliver solutions at the lowest possible cost. But that’s changing. In the past year, there’s been a rapidly growing trend for IaaS providers to add support for major commercial VM formats – especially VMware, but also Hyper-V and XenServer. The reason? To create an easy on-ramp for enterprises. As enteprises virtualize (and in many cases, build private clouds), the IaaS providers know that they need to make interoperability, hybrid, overdrafting, migration as easy as possible."

Rocky and Bullwinkle Creator Alex Anderson Dies - TIME - "Animation has had plenty of unknown geniuses — from the directors, artists and storymen of Walt Disney's early features to the sly hands behind the silent pornographic cartoon Buried Treasure — but few were more obscure, or more important, than Alexander Anderson, who died Friday at 90 in Carmel, Calif. Anderson created the characters Rocky the flying squirrel, Bullwinkle Moose and Dudley Do-Right, and the vaudeville-style format, for the 1959 animated program Rocky and His Friends and its 1961 spin-off The Bullwinkle Show, known collectively as The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. "

PeteSearch: Visualization myths around Snow's cholera map - "Visualizations are fantastic at engaging people, everyone loves maps. When it comes down to detailed analysis though, a spreadsheet or other list-based interface is almost always better. Maps and other visualizations tell stories so well because of how much they leave out, but textual representations still rule when it comes to actually working with the full data."

Friday, October 15, 2010

A VC: The Impact Of Priority Inbox - "If your email gets into the third section of the main page, called "Everything Else", I most likely won't see it unless I see it on my Android phone. And hopefully Google is working on bringing Priority Inbox to Android. When that happens, I won't ever see it."

Amazon Media Room: News Release - "Less than 10,000 words or more than 50,000: that is the choice writers have generally faced for more than a century--works either had to be short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the "heft" required for book marketing and distribution. But in many cases, 10,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages) might be the perfect, natural length to lay out a single killer idea, well researched, well argued and well illustrated--whether it's a business lesson, a political point of view, a scientific argument, or a beautifully crafted essay on a current event."

Talking Business - For H.P. Board, a Double Standard - NYTimes.com - Tough stuff. "More important, for a company that professes to be concerned with ethics — so concerned that it had to get rid of Mr. Hurd, with his piddling expense account problems — it is astonishing that it would find Mr. Apotheker’s lapses acceptable. He may not have been directly involved in this brazen theft of intellectual property, but it defies belief to say he didn’t know about it. And he did nothing to stop it until it was far too late. Apparently, the H.P. directors adhere to the highest ethical standards — but only when it’s convenient. "

What we can learn from procrastination : The New Yorker - "Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Seventh Seal” in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of “The Hangover.”"

First NYC/London cable in a decade promises sub-60ms latency - In case anyone had any doubts that even (very) extra-datacenter latency matters. "How can the speed of light vary among cable operators? It can't, but operators can plan their geographic routes strategically to keep the total cable length a bit shorter than the competition. According to the consultants at Telegeography, breaking 60ms would make Project Express at least 5ms faster than its closest competitor."

'Paradise' found: 70-ton elephant at S.F. Port - "The problem with the map is simple: it is huge and would cost a lot of money to move, restore and display it. The last estimate was in the range of $500,000. And that was 30 years ago. It is a classic white elephant, too valuable to scrap, but too expensive to keep."

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Some like it loud … « Music Machinery - "One of the nifty features that we’ve rolled out in the last 6 months here at the Echo Nest is an extremely flexible song search API. With this API you can search for songs based upon all sorts of criteria from tempo, key mode, duration. You can use this API to do things that would be really hard to do. "

louisgray.com: New Apple TV Extends Fragmentation, Cupertino Style - This is part and parcel of a broader content fragmentation within the home issue. As one commenter says,, this problem is hardly unique to Apple and partly stems from the content providers. However, Apple has hit the seamless user experience drum so hard that we expect more from Apple's product ecosystem hardware and software.

Monday, October 04, 2010

Weak Ties, Twitter and Revolution | Wired Science | Wired.com - "These are all important questions, and I don’t think we have many good answers. But I would quibble with Gladwell’s wholesale rejection of weak ties as a means of building a social movement. (I have some issues with Shirky, too.) It turns out that such distant relationships aren’t just useful for getting jobs or spreading trends or sharing information. According to Granovetter, they might also help us fight back against the Man, or at least the redevelopment agency."

Cloud Computing's Stormy Future - Bloomberg - "Cloud computing has the potential to generate a series of disruptions that will ripple out from the tech industry and ultimately transform many industries around the world. This is definitely a technology that deserves serious discussion from the entire senior leadership team of a company."

The Tech - Browse Volume 97 - Re: the latest Duke thing. Nothing is ever truly new. See story about thursday (newspaper) in this issue.

About Me

I'm technology evangelist for Red Hat, the leading provider of commercial open source software. I'm a frequent speaker at customer and industry events. I also write extensively on and develop strategy for Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio.

Prior to Red Hat, as an IT industry analyst, I wrote hundreds of research notes, was frequently quoted in publications such as The New York Times on a wide range of IT topics, and advised clients on product and marketing strategies. Among other hobbies, I do a lot of photography and enjoy the outdoors.